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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9030688" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 78: Jan/Feb 2000part 2/5Lear the Giant-King: In 1995 they did two shakespearean adventures in quick succession. Now they go back to the well a third time to blow the story of King Lear up to Storm Giant sized proportions. Even if you've spoiled yourself on the story, you'll need to be pretty high level to have a chance of influencing it to have a better outcome. By the time the PC's have a chance to get involved, he's already banished Cordelia and gone quite mad, which since he's a storm giant has dire consequences for the rest of the world, as a cataclysmic perpetual storm brews around his castle that will just spread and spread until he's killed or cured. You'll come across a severely wounded Cordelia, who will deliver the necessary exposition unless they kill her straight away without listening. (bad idea, but the adventure is built with enough flexibility that that wouldn't completely ruin it) To have a decent chance of getting a good ending, it'd be best not to go straight to attack him, but seek out other giants and get them on side. Can you cure the blinded Gloucester, intimidate Edmund into switching allegiances, find the disguised Edgar and get through his madness, solve the riddles of Clotpull the jester, find your way to Cornwall's undersea castle, get up to Goneril's cloud island, before finally making your way to Lear's castle for the final confrontation? Not much dungeoneering in this one, since each of the locations has relatively few, but giant-sized rooms, but a lot of room for dramatic roleplaying, epic battles and some serious environmental challenges in the overland bits between, as you'll need to be able to deal with both flying and underwater sections, all while enduring severe weather penalties. This puts together several different ideas that have been the whole gimmick in other adventures and expects the PC's to be able to cope with them all in quick succession. It's all pleasingly massive in scale, variety and ambition and I can quite see why they picked it as the cover story. Top marks. Now I just hope everything else in the issue won't feel like an anticlimax by comparison.Side Treks - Veiled Threats: Oh man, it's been a loooong time since we last faced Juiblex cultists. The frequency of old-school callbacks continues to increase. The lands of Baron Kendric Rodham (or suitable substitute in your own campaign) have been dealing with them for a while now and he's hiring you to take care of them. They're not about to just sit in their dungeon and wait for this though, and they'll disguise themselves as another band of supplicants to get near and attack, trying to kidnap him and get out rather than fighting to the death. They've planned this well in advance and are heavily buffed with various magics, so it's not impossible they'll succeed. Whether they do or not, that's an easy lead-in to another adventure, and this is where having read this for many years comes in handy, as I can recommend In The Black Hours (Polyhedron 22-23) or The Dark Conventicle (Dungeon 11) as particularly well suited to be joined up into a larger story here. So this is a demonstration of how to keep the whole get adventure hook, pursue plot formula from getting too boring and formulaic. It takes conscious effort to keep it from being a mysterious guy in a tavern every time and I'm glad the Dungeon editors go to that effort to mix it up. Useful on it's own and extra useful to a long-term reader like me.</blockquote>

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